Your views in 200 words or less

January 5, 2012 3:28 pm

It’s about time that our state stops discriminating against a portion of our citizens. The rules regarding marriage should be the same for everyone. After all, it isn’t a church ceremony that makes a marriage legal. It is the license received from the state.

Kudos to the governor, and here’s hoping our Legislature will do the right thing. “Equal” rights are not “special” rights.

Anti-miscegenation laws, also known as miscegenation laws, were laws that enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races. Such laws were first introduced in North America from the late seventeenth century onwards by several of the Thirteen Colonies, and subsequently by many US states and US territories and remained in force in many US states until 1967.

Discrimination against miscegenation mostly followed the mainstream Nazi anti-Semitism, which considered the Jewry as being a group of people bound by close, so-called genetic (blood) ties, to form a unit, which one could not join or secede from. The influence of Jews had been declared to have detrimental impact on Germany, in order to rectify the discriminations and persecutions of Jews. To be spared from that, one had to prove one’s affiliation with the group of the Aryan race.

on·to·log·i·cal (nt-lj-kl)
adj.
1. Of or relating to ontology.
2. Of or relating to essence or the nature of being.
3. Of or relating to the argument for the existence of God holding that the existence of the concept of God entails the existence of God.

Uh….yeah….sure.

How about this? Making marriage legal for same sex couples as well as opposite sex couples hurts no one. Keeping it illegal for one set IS discriminatory.

Now I realize I won’t win the Scrabble game with such simplicity, but it is a simple fact whose denial demonstrates a bigotry that is rather sickening and remindful of discrimination of recent history.

For the easily swayed, the discussion of ontology in this context will seem like a waste of time I suppose. For those who like to go deeper than the latest social winds will blow us, it’s quite significant.

Ontology is about what it means to be a human being. Clearly being a human being involves more than simply our animal nature. We have a moral code that transcends nature. We are able to exercise restraint for example, though you’d never know it based on current cultural trends. Still, nature informs our understanding of life and procreation.

It was absolutely wrong for laws to be on the books preventing human beings from marrying other human beings of a different race. There is, in interracial marriage, no defiance of the natural or moral order.
The marriage of a male to a male, however defies the natural order, and for those who follow certain books of holy writ such as the Q’ran and the Bible, it defies the moral code as well.

And before you leap to the keyboard to point out that homosexuality DOES occur in nature, remember that it is anomalous; contrary to the natural order.

So the question remains, is marriage the appropriate term for the union or the bond between two men or two women? Is it?

For those of you who want things to be easy (which is very different than “simple” X6) this is hardly navel contemplation. It’s called critical thinking.

concernedtacoma7 – the only thing that lessens the significance of a marital ceremony is when either of the couple decides that the vows they took are meaningless. Heterosexual couples are doing that just fine, without “gay marriage”.

muckibr – note how someone is “polluting” the definition of “ontology” for their own political purposes.

Not very “cool”.

As to “moral code” – my morals say that what two adults want to call their joining is their business, not mine. I’d be morally wrong to stick my nose in their business. I’m glad to see that someone realizes that holy books, regardless of which side of religion chosen, are manipulative texts for political purposes, disguised as morality.

X6 writes: “As to ‘moral code’ – my morals say that what two adults want to call their joining is their business, not mine. I’d be morally wrong to stick my nose in their business…”

I quite agree, but by asking my state to sanction whatever it is they call “their joining,” it becomes my business, even though I didn’t ask for it to be. They are then FORCING me to call their joining “marriage…”

X6, what these bigots refuse to recognize is that there are two different and distinct types of marriage. One is a religious ceremony, and they have a real problem with that one. The other is the civil contract, which is initiated by the issuance of a government marriage license that has nothing to do with the religious aspect of marriage. Neither has anything ontological about it.

Even when the state sanctions same sex marriage, churches can continue to refuse to marry gay and lesbian couples. One would think that would satisfy the bigots. They can go to their church councils and refuse to allow same sex couples to take those vows. Oh happy day!

But, the government should not be allowed to discriminate against couples simply because they are same sex. If two people want to engage in the contractual obligations of a state sanctioned marriage how does that affect the church version? Not at all.

What I keep seeing, in situations like this, is that there seems to be a deeply ingrained streak in some types of people that requires they have someone to legally discriminate against in order to make themselves seem more important. That’s their real problem with gay and lesbian marriage. When it happens, and it will, they will need to find some other group to discriminate against. That means they’ll have to do some work, and they don’t like that.

Reiterate all you want, you are still wrong. Just because you repeat the same wrong thing over and over again does not suddenly make it right. Wait a sec, you said that very same thing in another thread not so long ago, didn’t you? There is discrimination against same sex couples, and that’s why this marriage double-standard needs to be taken down.

And, while you have come out against laws against miscegenation (very progressive of you, I’m impressed!), you mustn’t forget that Natural Law was cited in support of anti-miscegenation laws……they went along these lines: A bluebird and a cardinal are each quite lovely birds but they would never inter-breed.

Natural law may have been cited but wrongfully so. This does nothing to alter the argument at hand. As for you using the Roman Catholic to back you up, how very…condescending of you.

And you’re right muckibr re the difference between a civil union and a relilgious one, but aislander is also right when he insists that the state is demanding that citizens describe the civil contract as marriage.

As long as the state issues a paper document entitled “Marriage License” through county and city offices, then the civil contract for same sex couples should be the same as the civil union for different sex couples. The government calls it Marriage for one type of couples union, then it is the same name for all types of couples unions. To do any different is, and I know this will upset aislander but I’m willing to risk that, as I say to call one joining of a couple a Marriage and the joining of another couple something else is DISCRIMINATION!!!!

The churches can do what they want to do. The state has no authority over them. If you personally do not want to recognize a couple as being married, then that’s your problem, or choice.

But the state is the servant of The People. The state (and by this I mean all government) is paid for and funded by taxpayers. Gay and lesbian Americans are taxpayers, and they have a RIGHT to get a document entitled “Marriage License” just like any other taxpayer. To deny them that RIGHT is DISCRIMINATION.

sozo: As I have demonstrated in that other thread, anti-miscegenation laws are not analogous to retaining the historical definition of marriage, since there is NO substantive difference between blacks and whites as people, but there are profound differences between men and women.

Therefore, discrimination based on racial characteristics is unconstitutional, but different treatment based on actual differences is not….

YOU ARE CORRECT, they will never be Equal to You, because they will always be SUPERIOR to the like of YOU!!!

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. EXCEPT FOR Pacman33, who is not equal to the rest of us because of his inferior bigoted thinking on the matter of equality for all Americans.”

Everything But Marriage Law,
State Registered Domestic Partnerships (SRDP) in Washington were created in the aftermath of the Andersen v. King County decision. Subsequent legislation has made a SRDP the equivalent of marriage under state law. Senate Bill 5688 would amend many state laws and place domestic partnership on an equal footing with civil marriage.

Well now that misinformed and ignorant distortion of facts by beerBoy is cleared up.

It’s all about religion. It’s about a radical and vindictive group of intolerant bullies getting their revenge against those who would dare not submit the demands to change their beliefs.

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